


Bedtime

by Hipporiot



Category: Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Bedtime Stories, Being bitchy in love, Cuddling & Snuggling, F/F, Fluff, Nightmares, Tender wlw content, being sleepy time cranky
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-22
Updated: 2019-07-22
Packaged: 2020-07-09 19:56:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,454
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19893478
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hipporiot/pseuds/Hipporiot
Summary: A brief nightmare, a bedtime story, and a kiss.See? A story, it'sverysimple.





	Bedtime

**Author's Note:**

> Decided I should break my writing dry spell by posting a Dragon Age fic from five years ago, because there isn't enough wlw in the world for me to be hoarding my crumbs. 
> 
> Rated T for one F-bomb and sensual descriptions with subtle implications of lust. I'm lil baby :p

She’s dreaming.

She has to be, because she stands in a field, a field with no end, beneath a sky of unfamiliar stars, the only light from the field all around her strewn with fire, but it’s green. It slinks through the brittle summer dried grass towards her and leaves ashy trails fluttering into the sky behind, nothing but charred earth and a wrong absence.

It has to be a dream, because the fire dances and laughs in a form too familiar - limbs plush, voice fluid, hair cloud-like, smirk contagious - a ghostly apparition of a woman she doesn’t want to see in flames frolics through the crops, setting them ablaze in numbing fire, laughing all the while.

She wants to reach out to her, douse her before she burns, or make way to feed her flames so she never goes out, but the woman who can’t be who she is, is always skipping just out of reach, laughing over her shoulder and teasing in words she doesn’t understand.

The woman’s hair catches on a scarecrow’s hat and sets it burning, she laughs even harder as she points at it, almost falling over as she hugs her stomach, looking back to Cassandra to see if she gets the joke, but she doesn’t. She keeps laughing anyway, screeches of hisses and crackles, but she stops to watch as the fire climbs down the scarecrow’s face and rips open it’s seams, makes it pop and fizz and sizzle. 

She isn’t laughing anymore.

She sobs into her hands, caught between absolute misery and unadulterated merriment, her fiery emerald tears seeping through cupped fingers onto the grass.

Everything is burning. 

She turns to Cassandra - the woman she doesn’t want to recognize, or see so completely unhinged, or on fire - she smiles wistfully, letting tears pour out of her eyes at the mere sight of Cassandra, opens her mouth-

“This is where you’ve been sleeping?”

Cassandra opens her eyes before she even realizes they were closed, instinctively grabbing for her sword even though she consciously knows she’s in no danger - it was only a dream after all. Thank the Maker.

She looks up at Yvaine, her gauzy robe thrown haphazardly over her silk nightgown and clouds of ginger hair pouring out of the scarf she’s wrapped around her head. One of her hands cups a gentle flame of veil fire, the other rests on her hip, her green eyes incredulous and obviously disappointed at the bedroll and makeshift room divider of books Cassandra has set up to clearly state where her bedroom begins and the forge ends.

She closes her eyes again, comforted by the darkness that greets her, but the image of the woman before her burning in madness is singed into her eyelids. She opens her eyes again, catching a wistful look on Yvaine’s face before she turns it into something more neutral.

“What is it, Yvaine.” Cassandra asks to the ceiling, not needing to look at Yvaine to know she’s hovering,

But she simply settles herself with a huff, gauze floating down around her as if the material world itself conspires in her grace.

“Yvaine.” She chides at the sparkling eyes settling about the room anywhere but her face. 

She pouts, subtle but completely for affect, “…I can’t sleep.” She says, voice tenderly tailored to tug heartstrings.

Cassandra sighs heavily as she sits up, an action as physical as a hoof to the ribs that is only ever aroused by Yvaine.

“Tell me a story.” Yvaine says, not a question.

“Me?” Cassandra scoffs, “I cannot spin a tale to save my life.”

“Good thing you’re perfectly safe.” She replies, leaning forward over her legs, and Cassandra feels distinctly that a smile like that is a complex contradiction to her statement.

“Please-“ She scoffs again, attempting to roll back her cover.

But Yvaine rolls forward in one fluid motion, the curve of her plush arms pulling her forward almost into Cassandra’s lap, “No ‘pleases’ or ‘buts’” she says with a shake of her head that sends ripples of unreal motion through her curls, “you know what you like to read, your life’s already been made into a legend,” she says, aware and indifferent of Cassandra’s shrinking personal space, “and your face makes up for any inexperience.” She adds pleasantly.

Cassandra takes a deep breath, Yvaine’s sweet musk of cooking herbs and tang of mana, sharp like the purest lyrium filling her lungs, possibly lowering her inhibitions, “If I do tell you a story-“ she muses, Yvaine’s eyes lighting in delight, “-you will sleep?”

“Cross my heart.” She vows in a near whisper, articulate nail grazing an x right across the soft skin of her flat chest peeking out of her gown in the quivering candle light.

Cassandra takes another breath of traitorously sweet air, settling herself back against her pillows, Yvaine following the motion as if their torsos were tethered, laying down next to her mere inches from her chest, feet just grazing and eyes never parting, “There once was a woman..." She starts, Yvaine’s eyes fluttering at the timber of her voice, "She was pious, just; she did her best, and what was right.” She says, never daring to look away from Yvaine’s gaze.

“And then what?” she asks, an interruption she’d chide if she couldn’t hear the yawn in Yvaine's voice.

“She encountered an obstacle,” she says, “-what some devout would call a test of faith.” She continues, “and this test deeply troubled her, for it challenged her morals, and her patience,” she adds, not bothering to hide her aggravation the same as Yvaine shows no shame smiling up at her, batting her lashes, “but most of all, her belief.”

“What did she do?” Yvaine asks, propping her chin on her wrists.

“She listened to friends, and to the chant, and when both only furthered her confusion, she turned to the one thing that could never lie to her,” she says, watching the candles reflect in the deep pools of green staring right back into her.

“What?” Yvaine asks.

“Her heart.” Cassandra says, remembering more than once in chantry tales of saints listening to the beat of drums and the rhythm of waves to hear the Maker’s will, “she listened till all else fell away.”

Yvaine shifts forward an important inch, resting her head against Cassandra’s chest that sets fire blazing up and through her lungs, “What did it say?” she whispers, ear to her breast and round eyes upward to Cassandra’s own.

She manages to breathe despite her lost breath, “It said, in the smallest whisper, as strong and sure as stone,” she says, watching Yvaine’s pink lips open in anticipation, eyes half-lidded but enraptured, “ _Go the fuck to sleep_.”

Yvaine scolds with a lacklustre slap to Cassandra's shoulder, “That’s a terrible story.” But she still rests her soft arms around Cassandra’s middle, and a smile tugs at her dimpled cheeks.

“I was going for realism.” Cassandra explains though she can feel her accent growing thicker with every later second, bells chiming midnight somewhere.

Somewhere not here, though, for within these walls there seems only Yvaine's intoxicating smell, and her haloed hair, and her sleepy smirk upon her rising chest, so tight and warm it could float away, and where she lays upon a wild grass cot as soft as Orlesian silk, sky star speckled and birds swirling above like leafs through the loft window.

There is no fire any hue, no madness or ash, just Yvaine's gentle purr of a snore, her arms weighing her down, safe and stable.

-

She wakes to warmth of morning light at her cheek, chant rising from the gardens as swiftly as the crows, and their shadows pass over her face, and the face at her side, freckled and sunkissed, warm red hair glowing like the sunshine.

It seems a silly thought as she lays against her, pressed rib to rib, heart to heart, and her eyelashes catch and filter the soft sunlight onto her lush lips, and amidst the songbirds and far off chant, but... she hears a beat. 

A beat that whispers truth.

She leans down to plant a chaste kiss, presses her lips to Yvaine’s and feels fingers card through her short hair, her own hands caressing the line of Yvaine’s cheekbones, pulling back to see a smug smile upon those lips, “Sleep well?” Yvaine drawls. 

“Very well.” She responds in a husk she can see Yvaine’s pupils grow at.

“We should do this all the time.” Yvaine mumbles, hands pawing up her arm and neck,

“Maybe.” Cassandra replies, an inch from her face even at the insistence to come closer still.

“Maybe” she agrees, meeting the last inch with hunger in equal with self-satisfaction.

_______________

**Author's Note:**

> Comment your favourite part and/or come checkout my twitter or my neglected but still very much there tumblr!


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